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“Nice to meet you,” I greeted with a smile.
Adrian continued without looking at me.
“She’s very nice and will be making sure that I’m kept up-to-date on all your lab work, how you’re feeling, and if there’s any changes.”
“She looks young,” Jasmine said uncertainly. “Will she be-will she be operating on me?”
I wanted to assuage her fears, assure her that no such thing would happen, but it wasn’t my place to speak.
“Absolutely not,” Adrian said. “First and foremost, because I want to do everything I can to stop you having surgery again, but secondly, because interns don’t do surgery. When she joins me in the OR, Dr. Christophers, along with her coursemates, will be watching surgeries performed, or at the very most, having the grand honor of holding open a body cavity.”
Jasmine wrinkled her nose at that but looked reassured.
“Oh, okay then.”
“We’ll leave you now, Jas, and let you get some rest.”
We walked out of the room. I saw Jasmine keep her game on pause and close her eyes. I couldn’t imagine how exhausted she probably was and turned my head away from her windows.
Once we were out of sight of her room, Adrian turned to us. His mouth was tight, and I wondered what he was thinking.
“Jasmine is very special to me. She came to me when she was six, because Boston Children’s decided that she was too high risk to try another transplant on. That kid has been through the wringer with her health, and my ultimate goal is to get her in a place where she can live an ordinary life. I don’t normally work with kids—we have an entire hospital in the city for that, but she’s different. She’s my most difficult case at the moment, and when you’re reading medical journals and studying, I want you to keep her in mind. We’re trying to find a solution, and you three are now part of that team, got it?”
We all nodded, and Adrian rubbed a hand over his face.
“Jesus, you can all talk, you know?”
“Sorry,” we all mumbled.
He rolled his eyes, and we followed him into the next room.
* * *
The day was fast paced.
I was always doing something or chasing up lab work. A few times, I was sent down to the ER to help with patient admission. All the staff watched me like I was a bomb ready to go off, and I thought it was just because of who I was, until I heard a doctor, I didn’t know whisper to an EMT.
“One day, we’ll like the ones that make it through the program, but right now, they’re just murderers. They haven’t had their first kill, and they don’t know how it will affect them.”
I winced at the words. Logically, I knew it was likely true. All of us were bursting at the seams with knowledge and eagerness but were lacking considerably in the experience department. We didn’t have the intuition that guided so much of the work in the hospital. I wondered who would be my first kill.
Then, my brain thought of Jasmine Campbell, and I prayed that it wouldn’t be her. I had to just do my best, I had to make sure Adrian knew everything that could possibly be wrong with her, and I had to research new methods in treating rejection in transplant patients.
So that was how I found myself during my first, second, and third breaks of my first shift. I would curl up in a corner of the cafeteria and crawl through pages of medical “breakthroughs” that were really just clickbait.
“You know, breaks are for relaxing ormaybestudying if you really need to. You’re not supposed to be so insane that you burn yourself out in the first week.”
I looked up and Adrian was sitting across from me, a sandwich in front of him. Between his professional demeanor and the busy day, I had almost forgotten what the sight of him smiling did to me, or rather, to my poor heart.
“You told us to keep an eye out for anything that could help Jasmine, Dr. Price,” I replied.
He waved a hand to dismiss what I’d said.
“Adrian. Don’t call me Dr. Price. It’s weird.”
Because we slept together, I thought silently.
“Then please call me Stevie,” I replied. “Only my father calls me Stephanie.”
